Nu's Williams Has Come Long Way In Short Time

It is a raw, windy spring day and Bears running back Bob Christian is standing hunched along the sidelines in Dyche Stadium, watching Northwestern quarterback Len Williams throw downfield.

Christian thinks back to another day, his senior year at Northwestern, when Williams was making his first Big 10 start against Indiana, and the Hoosiers brought blitz after blitz and buried the Wildcats 42-0.

"He's come a long way since then," muses Christian. Len Williams has come a very long way, even from last spring when he was introduced to new head coach Gary Barnett and a new offense that was to bring him so much agony and, eventually, ecstasy.

Spring football was a rude shock to Williams, who had started every game for two years after redshirting-as a running back-his freshman year. During the course of that spring, he would be demoted to second string and would begin to form the notion that, no matter what, this would be his last year at Northwestern.

"Len was a product of a completely different system and approach," recalls Barnett. "He had a tough time making the transition from an offense where he was not required to do a lot mentally, where he was not required to be totally in control of the offense. In the old system, the coaches controlled everything. Ours put the whole thing on the quarterback.

"Also my approach as a coach was different. Lenny was the best player here, so Lenny got to do what Lenny wanted to do. My approach was he was just one of the players."

"I was struggling with it," admits Williams of Barnett's offense. "I thought it was making me look bad. It made me really not want to learn it, as far as paying attention and looking at film."

But he came back in the fall with a new attitude and "it started clicking." Not that everything fell into place at once. After a horrid performance against Indiana when, says Williams, "I was taken out at halftime and I felt the coaches didn't have any confidence in me, I had decided that this was my last year, that the Wisconsin game would be my last game at Northwestern. It was a scary feeling, knowing it was my last season."

Things started to turn around the next week against Ohio State. And the week after that, Williams threw for three fourth-quarter touchdowns against Illinois to pull out a game that had seemed hopelessly lost.

"They (Ohio State) thought they could take advantage of my supposed weakness as far as recognizing the blitz," recalls Williams. "The next week, Illinois also put pressure on me, and we burned them all day."

By now he was beginning to realize what Barnett had tried to tell him all along, that this new system was not a quarterback's nightmare but a dream come true.

"It's so versatile," Williams says. "It's unstoppable if you execute it right."

Friends began whispering into Williams' ear that if he had NFL aspirations, another college season would be benefical. He couldn't help but notice that virtually the entire offense would be coming back, including receiver Lee Gissendaner, a potential Heisman Trophy candidate.

"And I felt I owed it to the other guys who were coming back," Williams says. So he decided to return for a final season, and Barnett thinks that gives Northwestern an offense that can be "one of the top three or four in the league. By the end of the year, I thought Lenny had grown into a complete quarterback.

"Now he's becoming a leader. I see him being an all-around great quarterback. What he gives you is mobility; he's got a strong arm, he's intelligent and he's a tough, tough-minded kid."

Williams already owns Northwestern's career record for touchdown passes (33), and with just an average year will finish his career owning every school record for passing and total offense.

But he almost didn't last beyond his freshman year, when he was converted to running back.

"I was out of here," he says. "The only reason I stayed was because of my mother. She told me if football didn't work out, I should stay and get the education. Basically, she told me if I came home I'd have no place to stay."